Alastair Reynolds - Poseidon's Wake

‘A problem for us, or for them?’

‘On the evidence, very much for them. We’re on the nightside now, which makes it easier — let me turn down the lights a little more.’

Vasin blacked out the cabin completely, leaving the moons and the stars as their only sources of illumination. The moons were too small to matter and the stars too far away. Goma floated in darkness until her eyes began to pick up something else.

Tiny migraine flashes, somewhere out there — almost too faint to detect, like ghost signals on her optic nerve. Pinks and greens and oranges, starbursts and starfish, tracing the same ecliptic plane as the moons.

‘They’re dying,’ Vasin said. ‘They’ve been trying to cross that line of moons for hours, ever since they fell into that new configuration, and they’re being sliced and diced. One after the other, they keep coming. It’s as if they’re too huge, too slow, to realise their mistake — like a pod of whales coming ashore, beaching themselves.’

‘You can see it happening?’

‘On long-range, yes. Whatever’s killing them, it’s hard to see where it originates. The moons, maybe — or even something out there we haven’t detected yet. For all we know, the moons are just the sensory elements of a defence system we can’t even see.’

Goma thought about that for a moment. ‘Now you’re scaring me.’

‘If you’re not scared, you don’t understand the situation. My — did I just sound like Eunice for a moment?’

‘She rubs off.’

‘I hope you’ll understand why I couldn’t authorise another expedition down the wheel. I want them all back here — but I won’t put more lives at risk to make it happen. Sometimes being a captain is about making the unpopular decisions — the ones you know you’ll stand a good chance of being hated for.’

‘You’ve done well, Gandhari. You’ve brought us this far, and you’ve shared a ship with Eunice. It can’t have been easy, working in her shadow.’

‘The airlock was never far away.’

‘For her, or for you?’

‘Either option was on the table. But you know, I still can’t decide whether we’ve really met her or not. She walks and talks like the real thing, and Nhamedjo — although it pains me to mention his name — told us she was real, all the way through. I’m sure Mona would agree, if she ran the same tests — the treacherous fucker had no reason to lie about that .’

Goma, despite her fatigue, despite her apprehension, laughed. ‘That’s not very captainly language, Gandhari.’

‘Do forgive me — I’ve had a taxing few days.’

‘You’re forgiven. But I agree — I still don’t know what to make of her. Where have her memories come from? They’re incomplete, stitched together from biographical fragments — they’re not actual memories at all. Then again, the construct version of Eunice lived several lifetimes on Zanzibar . Those memories are authentic — they’re just not part of the original Eunice’s life. Then she met the Watchkeepers, and they dismantled her and put her back together again using biological material. And she’s lived another lifetime or two in this form. What does that make her? More or less than the original Eunice? Her equal in every way? An extension of the same personality? If we take her back with us, what rights would she have?’

‘There’s no precendent for her,’ Vasin said. ‘She’s as strange as anything out there. Wonderful, intimidating — scary. And as sly as a fox. That trick she pulled on us with the mirrors — I’m still trying to work that one out. Did she commit the worst crime imaginable, or did she save lives and start another adventure?’

‘Kanu still went to Poseidon.’

‘But of his own volition, to spare the Risen. She can’t be blamed for his selflessness.’

‘I wonder if we’ll ever know what she did to Zanzibar .’

‘We won’t rest until we do. Collectively, I mean — as a society. Also, she’s demonstrated something rather significant — that whatever we don’t understand about the M-builders, and that’s rather a lot, we do have the ability to operate their technology.’

‘We’re just monkeys hitting piano keys.’

‘And maybe we’ll hit a tune now and then. It might take time. But I’m a navigator, Goma. People like me won’t rest until we’ve found a way to use the Mandalas. To go from our fastest ships to being able to travel as close to the speed of light as we can imagine?’

‘Aren’t you disappointed not to have something faster?’

‘I’ll take what I can get. I want to know how far that network extends — to ride the Mandalas so deep into the galaxy that our sun’s just another nameless dot in the Milky Way.’

‘You might skip between those stars quicker than you can blink, but it’ll still be years and years of travel for the people left at home.’

‘There aren’t any,’ Vasin said. ‘Not for me, at least.’

‘I still want to go home.’

‘You will. And here’s something else to think about. There is no Mandala in Earth’s solar system — at least not that we know of. Our best intelligence says Crucible’s is the nearest one.’

‘Crucible’s going to change.’

‘If the Mandalas allow us to use them, then yes. Your little planet — and remember, I wasn’t born there — it’s going to assume a different importance from now on. Crucible will be the gateway — the port of entry.’

‘Into what?’

‘We’ll find out. When we make it work.’

They turned their attention back to the distant lights of dying Watchkeepers. It was beautiful and sublime. Goma took no joy in the deaths of the alien machines, rather a sadness that they could not see their own folly.

Eventually the attrition slowed — the lights fading away like the last desultory bursts of a fireworks display.

‘There are more still out there,’ Vasin said, ‘but they must have had the sense to hold back.’

‘I almost feel sorry for them.’

‘You shouldn’t. They’ve caused us enough trouble.’

That was true, and her words should have been enough to settle Goma’s doubts. But still, the Watchkeepers had been kind to Eunice — or at least merciful — and they had given her a gift beyond measure. Perhaps it had been nothing to them, a kindly gesture almost too small for their accounting — like a person tipping an upended insect back onto its legs, the whim of a moment. But they had made her human, put life into her lungs, given her dreams and sorrows, all the stuff of mortality. They had given Eunice back to herself.

Goma could forgive them a lot for that.

She went to see Nissa, so that she would have something to report to Kanu. Nissa was still unconscious, still in Dr Andisa’s care. At least the best was now being done for her, although Andisa would not be pushed on her chances. Her suit had run out of power sooner that it ran out of air, so the cold of the high atmosphere had been her first problem. Despite layers of insulation, she had still suffered frostbite to her face and extremities, visible now where Andisa had applied a blue medical salve, especially around the temples and cheekbones. Oxygen starvation had come after the frostbite, and she could not have escaped neurological damage of some degree. But they had restored heat and air before the ascent, so things had certainly not worsened from that point on.

‘I barely know her,’ Goma said, ‘but I want her to live. It’s not just because of Kanu, of what her dying would do to him after all this. She came all this way, survived everything up until the wheel — even the Terror. It’s not right that she should die of fucking frostbite and oxygen starvation!’

‘We will do what we can,’ Andisa said gently.